Favorite Schools

Favorite Teams

Ledger Live's Shark Days of Summer: Swimming in the shark tank in Camden

Swimming with the sharks at Camden’s Adventure AquariumLedger Live for August 12, 2014 - Ledger Live with Brian Donohue. In the first installation of Ledger Live’s “Shark Days of Summer” video series, Donohue and videographer Andre Malok take part on the Swim with the Sharks program at the Adventure Aquarium in Camden, one of the few facilities in the nation that allow members of the public to actually enter the shark tank. (Video by Brian Donohue and Andre Malok / The Star-Ledger)

As they do every year, the folks at the Discovery Channel will be broadcasting an entire week’s worth of sensationalist (and sometimes just fake) shark programming, this week, taking viewers across the globe to examine shark life and lore, riding the never ending wave of fascination with sharks to TV ratings heights in the process.

Here at Ledger Live, we’re doing a bit of the same - but we’re staying right here in New Jersey. Oh, and we'll stick to non-fiction - because New Jersey's sharky history is tragically strange and colorful enough that there's just no need for fiction.

New Jersey is where the modern human obsession with what surfers call "the man in the grey suit" first began, with a series of deadly attacks in 1916. And here is also where it plays out in colorful and sometimes oddball ways. We’ll meet a 9-year-old girl who decorates her birthday cake with bloody body parts and talk to the author of 12 Days of Terror, the definitive book on the 1916 attacks.

For the first video, though, I thought it was best to meet some sharks firsthand.

As member of a group of humans that are the most common type of shark attack victim - surfers - sharks are nearly always in the back of my mind. But, even after decades of surfing from Australia to Ireland I had never gone nose to nose with one until we shot today’s video.